Last chance to see Scott Weaver's award-winning Rohnert Park Christmas display

There’s no end to the potential finishing touches and tweaks. But for the most part, Scott Weaver, Rohnert Park’s compulsively inventive ex-groceryman, has completed the farewell opus in his front yard that each night brightens the faces of youngsters whose expressions suggest they’re taking in the most wondrous sight on Earth.

“Dog!” a little guy declared as he pointed at one of the many handmade cutout characters in the Christmas display that Weaver, creator also of a famed toothpick sculpture of San Francisco, has refined and expanded for 22 years.

Scattered throughout the jam-packed, blindingly illuminated yard and roof of the Cielo Circle home that Weaver has masked as a stone castle are his spot-on renditions of nearly “101 Dalmatians” and the other universally adored critters, heroes, animated teapots and such of virtually every animated Disney movie.

Here, too, are nutcracker soldiers, snow-people, penguins, the Flintstones, snowflakes, the Peanuts gang, candy canes, the Weaver family’s late Great Dane, Chloe; Woody the Woodpecker, elves, the “South Park” crew, reindeer, Santa Clauses, drums, gingerbread men and so many other characters and objects that a visitor could make new discoveries for several nights on end.

Weaver will treat the public to the display through Christmas, then he’ll flip off the 35,000 or so lights - for the last time.

At 56, the astonishingly driven and sociable retired Lucky Supermarket produce department worker, knife-and-ax juggler, acrobat and long-dry recovering alcoholic has had enough of the annual ritual that takes the time, effort and expense of creating a typical residential Christmas display and multiplies it by maybe 100.

To resolve and then announce that this will be final year of Weaver’s Winter Wonderland has been no bowl of chocolate-dipped cherries. “I’ve had an emotional time,” Weaver said.

He’s well aware that to come and enjoy his display, which two years ago brought him a $50,000 prize from ABC-TV’s “The Great Christmas Light Fight,” has become a treasured holiday tradition for kids of all ages from throughout Rohnert Park and far beyond.

As he prepared for the Dec. 1 premiere of his 22nd and final exhibit, a woman approached and told him, “I want you to know that when I’ve gone through stuff in my life, this is the one place I wanted to come to for the holidays.”

It pains Weaver to know that ending the tradition will disappoint people. But he feels that he has long enough busied himself building the display in November, welcoming in great crowds of visitors throughout December, then taking it all down and storing it in January.

Why, just last weekend, he said, his brother phoned to say his son was in town and to ask if Weaver would like to meet them for lunch. “No, I can’t,” he answered, “I’ve got to work on the castle.”

He has concluded it’s just not fair to his wife, Rochelle, that he makes himself so scarce to her at this time of year, year after year. “She has put up with so much,” he said.

As Rochelle Weaver worked on the miniature town and railroad in the garage, she admitted that she’s ready to see her husband’s holiday mission conclude.

“I never see him for three months,” she said. “It’s all he does.”

Scott Weaver said that next year, he’ll string some lights around a front window and that will be that. He knows that certain of his neighbors on Cielo Circle, a cul-de-sac, will be happy for the lights and characters and huge crowds they attract to go away.

News flash: Weaver said a good friend of his, one who has made good use of the giant snowman he used to have in his display, is eager to take the plywood castle and many of the characters.

Perhaps as soon as Christmas 2017, Jeff Milani will use them to dress his family’s house on Circle Drive, just blocks from the Weaver house.

Weaver will give parts of his holiday spectacle to other friends and neighbors, and he’ll keep a few. There are about 19 plywood Christmas trees that he’s always called Mom’s Trees and that he’ll hold onto, for Rochelle.

He also will keep the wooden sleigh that he made and that too many kids to count have sat in at the edge of the driveway as their parents snapped photos backgrounded by the castle.

Weaver will save the sleigh for his and Rochelle’s only child, Tyler, who was a toddler the first year of the lights-and-characters display and over time became a major partner in its evolution.

Tyler is 25 now and earlier this year left the nest. His dad said maybe it’s no coincidence that he decided only months after Tyler moved out of the house that Weaver’s Winter Wonderland has gone on long enough.

You can reach Staff Writer Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.